Blackguards - Win an Early Access Deluxe Edition @RPGWatch!

December 16th, 2013, 12:55

Last weekend the 3rd of 5 chapters in Daedalic's tactical RPG Blackguards was released on Steam Early Access. Daedalic sent us a couple of Steam keys for the Deluxe Edition, and if you are among the lucky winners you can enjoy the first 30-40 hours of the game later this week.

All you have to do is post your answer to a simple question in the comment thread. It doesn't matter whether your answer is serious or funny. The winners will be picked randomly.

The question is:

Why is turn-based combat better than real-time combat?

I'll draw the winners in a couple of days and give notice at least 12 hours earlier.

TB offers the ability to leverage additional tactical options. It's a lot harder to leverage the advantage of height bonuses (added damage, distance, or accuracy) in real time, especially when trying to coordinate multiple units.

With deep combat mechanics, games can create a chess like feeling where you analyze every move in an attempt to ensure you're making the best available choice. IE Final Fantasy Tactics not accidentally moving a unit into a spell or accidentally moving someone targeted by a spell into your own units or into depth 2+ water preventing the unit from acting. There's a very clear and concise punishment for making the wrong moves in a TB system that can be mitigated in RT.

It's way easier to control a squad with some method to slow down time, even if it's RTwP. Something like Krater, which is squad based RT with no pause, can put you in positions where you lose the fight because you don't have an opportunity to give precise reactionary orders to your squad. Very easy to pull aggro with your medic and not be able to adequately dump it due to the lack of pause. It can feel frustrating because it's somewhat clunky and avenues to fix the problem are a bit more limited.

( On the other hand, people could say about real-time combat : "It is about doing. And I do, therefore I am." )

— “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

I prefer TB because it can be more tactical. What I mean is that you can create true front lines (block opponent with warriors to protect weaker characters in the back). With Dragon Age for example; I never felt happy with the combat because it was virtually impossible for the warriors to create any sort of barrier against the attackers (in fact the casters were better at creating barries via special spells). Now this doesn't mean that real time cannot be more tactical as it is dependent on the implementation detail (certainly adding guard and similar features might help) but the recent games with real time (or real time pause) such as nwn/dragon age have not done a very good good job espically when compared to games like king bounty or toee. Hum. I should probably replay iwd and bg to see why this was less of an issue in those games (or maybe i just didn't notice so many years ago). Also wiz 8 did a better job here than dragon age. Anyways that is why I tend to prefer TB; because you can create more realistic lines of defenses (reliastic here does not mean reality but rather pragmatic). Also it is easier (I think) to implement things like terrain benefits and weather benefits and such - these can be done in real time games (king arthur actually did a pretty darn good job here) but again they tend to be more common and better done in TBS !

On a more serious note, I don't believe one can be said to be better than the other. However, I can say I prefer TB since I don't feel rushed to act and can think over my strategy and use whatever abilities and stuf I can as best as I can. Call it strategy, call it something else, but that's how I see things.